Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  Naturally these two complemented each other19 with Alexander always the more popular, but Torrey (who in principle favored heart religion and talked a great deal about the Holy Spirit) providing the intellectual backbone. This relationship between heart and intellect almost always characterized the central individuals and groups in the emerging fundamentalist movement. At least seventy-five percent of fundamentalists’ talk and writing was devoted to popular piety, simple Bible study, and soul winning—themes that one might associate with Moody, Sankey, or Alexander. The other twenty-five percent, however, gave the movement its distinctive character and distinguished it from the general revivalist trend of which it was a part. These distinguishing features need to be explained, especially some rather remarkable intellectual traits and assumptions. For understanding these and for understanding their relationship to American culture, the growth of dispensational premillennialism within the larger revivalist and anti-liberal movements offers some most intriguing clues.

  V. Two Revisions of Millennialism

  In 1909 William Newton Clarke, a leading liberal Baptist theologian, looking back over his career, recalled that during the 1870s American evangelicals had debated with unusual fervor the question of the return of Christ. “The premillennial and postmillennial views of the advent,” he recollected, “were presented, elaborated, and defended, sometimes with conspicuous power.”1

  This debate concerning the “last times” was intimately related to a crisis in basic assumptions that was rending the Western Christian world during Clarke’s lifetime. New patterns of thought demanded that intellectual inquiry focus on describing the natural forces that seemed to determine how change took place. No longer viewing knowledge as the fixed truths of special or natural revelation, human scientific inquiry now concentrated on speculative hypotheses that explained natural processes of development. In the shape of Darwinism and higher criticism, these assumptions led toward conclusions that seemed to threaten the foundations of traditional Christian belief. Even the highest ideals, truths of the heart, moral sentiments, and the religious experiences through which some Christians said God was known, were often viewed as largely the product of historical developments.

  For many liberal Christians the only way to save Christianity at all was to affirm that God continued to reveal himself both in profound religious and moral experiences and in cultural processes as well. Despite naturalistic explanations of historical development, God could still be seen in the progress of humanity and civilization. Cultural advance revealed the kingdom of God. Thus the topic of the coming of the kingdom, so intensely discussed of the 1870s, involved not only the basic issue of the nature of Christianity, but also a wide set of questions concerning the proper relation between Christianity and modern civilization.

  The question of Christianity and civilization was complicated. Mid-nineteenth-century Western culture was in the midst of a process of secularization—by which is meant a trend away from distinctly Christian influences.2 The magnitude of the revolution was, as Martin Marty points out, “comparable to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.” Yet in America, as Marty also demonstrates, this upheaval produced little direct confrontation between the forces of faith and infidelity. Unlike many European countries, the United States experienced little virulent anticlericism and hostility to Christianity in the nineteenth century. The characteristic American response to secularization was to bless its manifestations—such as materialism, capitalism, and nationalism—with Christian symbolism.3

  Postmillennialism, by far the prevalent view among American evangelicals between the Revolution and the Civil War, helped provide the framework for this approach to secularization. Articulated as a distinct view in early eighteenth-century England, postmillennialism was promoted in America during the Great Awakening, notably by Jonathan Edwards. According to the postmillennialists, the prophecies in the book of Revelation concerning the defeat of the anti-Christ (interpreted as the Pope and other leaders of false religions) were being fulfilled in the present era, and were clearing the way for a golden age. This “millennium” (the “one thousand years” of Revelation 20) would be the last epoch of the present historical era. During this time the Holy Spirit would be poured out and the Gospel spread around the world. Christ would return after this millennial age (hence “postmillennialism“) and would bring history to an end.4

  Postmillennialists typically were optimistic about the spiritual progress of the culture. They saw human history as reflecting an ongoing struggle between cosmic forces of God and Satan, each well represented by various earthly powers, but with the victory of righteousness ensured. In the early nineteenth century many American postmillennialists believed the defeat of the Satanic forces to be imminent. With the Papal and Islamic powers in an apparent state of decline, the more literal-minded concluded that the twelve hundred and sixty days (years) of the reign of anti-Christ (Revelation 11) would end around the 1860s. In any case American evangelical postmillennialists saw signs of the approach of the millennial age not only in the success of revivals and missions, but also in general cultural progress. The golden age would see the culmination of current reform efforts to end slavery, oppression, and war. Moreover, in this wonderful era science, technology, and learning would advance to undreamed of accomplishments.5

  Americans were easily persuaded that their nation was destined to lead the way in such cultural advances. By the Revolution many evangelicals were already loudly proclaiming that the triumph of the American cause and of American principles was a sign of the kingdom.6 The spiritual hope was thus partly secularized and nationalized as the American civil religion was born. At the same time, however, the American experiment and the continuing efforts for cultural reform and progress were to a degree Christianized. The idea of transforming the culture fit well with the Calvinist Puritan tradition, but the idea of “Christianizing” the culture never turned out to be as simple as supposed. In some areas—such as the campaign against slavery—evangelicals succeeded somewhat in transforming the culture by Christian standards. In other areas, just as certainly, the culture—with its materialism, capitalist competitiveness and nationalism—helped shaped American Christianity. Seemingly oblivious to this distinction at the time, evangelicals generally regarded almost any sort of progress as evidence of the advance of the kingdom.

  After the Civil War the more liberal evangelicals, whose basic epistemological categories were profoundly altered by the new naturalism and historicism, began gradually to abandon the dramatically supernatural aspects of the postmillennial view of history. In particular they ceased to take seriously the idea that history was determined by a cosmic struggle between the armed forces of God and Satan and that these supernatural powers might directly intervene at any moment. William Newton Clarke found New Testament predictions of the early physical return of Christ to be the anomaly that decisively destroyed his belief in the total infallibility of the Bible.7 In place of spectacularly supernatural concepts of the kingdom, Clarke saw it as “natural and normal.” The kingdom was not future or otherworldly, but “here and now.” It was not external, but an internal ethical and religious force based on the ideals of Jesus.8

  Clarke’s controversial contemporary, Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary in New York, similarly described the kingdom that Jesus preached. “The kingdom of God,” said McGiffert, “was the burden of his preaching, not a kingdom lying in another world beyond the skies but established here and now.” This kingdom meant “the control of the lives of men and of all their relationships one with another and of all the institutions in which those relationships find expression by the spirit of Jesus Christ who has shown us what God is and what he would have this world be.”9 Such sentiments were reiterated countless times in the half-century from 1880 to 1930.

  While these liberals were not absolutely optimistic about cultural progress and recognized the continuing power of evil,10 they did retain both the formal structure and the essential conf
idence of the older postmillennial view. They had, however, discarded many supernaturalistic features that lay beyond ordinary experience. They had also secularized it in that they moved the site of the kingdom to this world wnere its progress could be seen in the divinely inspired developments of everyday life. For such progressive thinkers, though they were still committed to many Biblical ideals, modern culture was becoming normative for understanding revelation; a generation earlier. evangelicals, though often much influenced by current cultural ideals, had regarded the Bible as the preeminent guide to understanding culture.

  The new premillennialism, which like the new liberalism began to be widely accepted in America during the 1870s, was an almost completely antithetical response to the crisis in evangelical models.11 Premillennialism, which had an ancient Christian lineage, provided a framework for answers to the critical questions of how truth is known and how Christianity relates to civilization. In America before the Civil War premillennialism of a traditional variety was an important minority position, held by some mainline Protestant leaders. It did not differ greatly from the postmillennialism of the same era. Both saw history as controlled by a cosmic struggle, both allowed for interpreting some Biblical prophecies literally, and both thought that some prophecies about the time immediately preceding the millennium were already being fulfilled in current events. They disagreed primarily over whether Christ would come before or after the millennium. The premillennialists were prone to a more literal interpretation of Scripture and were less hopeful concerning progress. During the 1860s, premillennialism of this sort was rapidly rising in popularity.12

  With this general model available, those who turned to the new dispensational premillennialism responded to the crisis of the post-Civil-War era by shoring up the places in the foundation of Christian belief that they considered most in danger of erosion. In the areas where liberalism appeared vague and ethereal, dispensational premillennialism was explicit and concrete. Dispensationalism certainly did not grow only in reaction to liberal theology. In the 1870s, liberalism was not yet a cause cefebre and dispensationalists had many other concerns. The intellectual and cultural issues that fostered liberalism were already present, however, and their impact on Protestantism in Germany was known and feared.13 It is clear that the views of John Nelson Darby as accepted by the American adherents of the Niagara and International Prophecy conferences of the late nineteenth century, popularized by W. E. Blackstone’s Jesus is Coming and systematized by James H. Brookes and then by his protégé C. I. Scofield,14 opposed the liberal trends at almost every point.

  These teachers held that the Bible was absolutely reliable and precise in matters of fact, that its meanings were plain, and that whenever possible it should be taken literally. They reached a central conclusion which was equally distant from that of their liberal contemporaries. Christ’s kingdom, far from being realized in this age or in the natural development of humanity, lay wholly in the future, was totally supernatural in origin, and discontinuous with the history of this era. This was a point on which the new dispensational premillennialism differed from older forms of premillennialism. For the dispensationalists the prophecies concerning the kingdom referred wholly to the future. This present era, the “church age,” therefore could not be dignified as a time of the advance of God’s kingdom.

  The key to understanding the whole dispensational system is a very ingenious and complex interpretation of a prophecy in Daniel 9 concerning “seventy weeks” (see accompanying chart for the text of this crucial passage). The seventy weeks (or seventy “sevens“) is interpreted as meaning four hundred ninety years. Four hundred eighty-three of these years (seven weeks and sixty-two weeks) are thought to refer precisely to the period from the rebuilding of Jerusalem recorded in Ezra and Nehemiah to the time of Christ. The startling and ingenious aspect of the interpretation is that it posits that these first sixty-nine weeks were not immediately followed by the seventieth. Rather, it suggests that the entire church age (not clearly indicated in the Old Testament prophecies) intervenes between the sixty-ninth and seventieth week.15 This leaves a host of prophecies to be fulfilled in this last brief seven-year time, which is the final period before Christ sets up the millennial kingdom. These events, as elaborated in Daniel and Revelation, will include the appearance of the “anti-Christ” or “false prophet,” who will likely be an ecclesiastical tyrant backed by the united apostate churches; the corresponding emergence of a political leader, known in Revelation as “the Beast,” who will reunite ten nations that have grown out of the Roman Empire (the ten toes in the vision of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2) forming a new Roman Empire (“Babylon” in Revelation); the return of the Jews in unbelief to Palestine; the conversion of some of the Jews; their intense persecution, especially by the great world leaders, during the final three and one half years or “great tribulation;” the personal return of Christ with all the saints forming an army that will engage and defeat the combined forces of the Gentile world powers, the Beast, and the false prophet, at a place in the Near East known as Armageddon. With this victory the millennial reign of Christ at Jerusalem will commence.16 These long-postponed seven years thus allowed a time for the literal fulfillment of prophecies that dealt with the restored nation of the Jews and not with the church. According to the view that came to prevail (although the movement split internally over chronology)17 the living true saints of the church would at the outset be rescued from the turmoil of the seven years in the “secret rapture,” by which they would be taken out of the world to “meet Christ in the air.”

  The immediate implications of the idea that the four hundred ninety years should be divided into a four-hundred-eighty-three-year section and a much later seven-year period center on the church age that fills the intervening gap. This current age or dispensation is sharply separated from all teachings of Scripture having to do with the Jewish people, whether in the Old Testament or in the age of the kingdom to come. Even Christ’s ministry was set in the era before the church age began. Thus his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer proclaim righteousness on legal grounds (being still part of the Jewish “dispensation of law“) rather than on a doctrine of grace (which characterizes the church age or “dispensation of grace“).18 The church age is thus a historical “parenthesis.” The Old Testament hardly intimated its coming, the age having been rather a “mystery” revealed only with the Jews’ rejection of Christ’s kingdom. Unlike the postponed kingdom, which has a definite material and institutional structure, the interim church age of grace is a non-institutional age of the Holy Spirit. The true church is not the institutional church, which is worldly and steadily growing in apostasy. It is rather a faithful remnant of the spiritual who are “separate and holy” from the world.19

  From Dispensational Truth or God’s Plan and Purpose in the Ages (Philadelphia, 1920 [1918]).

  These then are the essentials of the dispensational premillennial system. “Dispensationalism” refers to the sharp separations of the various historical eras, or dispensations, recounted or predicted in the Bible. Dispensational interpreters, who divided history back to the beginning, usually found seven distinct eras. Details varied and are less significant than the system.20 By no means all premillennialists associated with the prophetic movement and later fundamentalism were dispensationalists; yet the traits of the dispensationalism that were prevalent represent the main tendencies of the movement.

  Ironically, the dispensationalists were responding to some of the very same problems in Biblical interpretation that were troubling theological liberals in the nineteenth century. If Biblical statements were taken at face value and subjected to scientific analysis, major anomalies seemed to appear. Among these were that many Old Testament prophecies did not seem to refer precisely to the church, that Jesus and his disciples seemed to expect his return and the establishment of the kingdom very shortly, and that much of the teaching of Jesus seemed to conflict with the theology of Paul. Liberals resolved s
uch problems by greatly broadening the standards for interpreting Biblical language. Dispensationalists did the opposite. They held more strictly than ever to a literal interpretation but introduced a new historical scheme whose key was the interpretation of the church age as a parenthesis. Once the key step was accepted, the rest of Scripture could be fit into the scheme, and aspects that others viewed as inconsistencies could be explained as simply referring to different dispensations.

  The underlying reasons for the growing acceptance of this new model for Biblical interpretation are not entirely clear. Two factors, which will be discussed in succeeding chapters, seem to have converged. One was a set of intellectual predispositions—characteristic of one type of nineteenth-century thought—to interpret Scripture in a literal way and to develop a distinctive view of history. The other was the secularization of the culture. With the rapid process of secularization throughout the nineteenth century, inevitably some people questioned the continued close identification of the church with the culture. In Great Britain the issue focused on the established church, so that John Nelson Darby’s original impetus to find new principles of Biblical interpretation apparently was his need to explain the seeming corruptness of the establishment.21 In America, later in the century, increasing secularization was more often perceived as the failure of postmillennial promises concerning the growth of the kingdom in this age. Non-Christian growth throughout the world appeared to be proceeding at a more rapid rate than was Christian advance. Whether such thoughts about the state of culture led to new ways of looking at Scripture, or whether the ways of looking at Scripture led to new ways of viewing the relationship of church and culture is not clear. Each factor, as well as the convergence of the two, however, can give us insight into the distinctive traits of the movement.